


Series 14, Episode 10 - The Doctor Pays.

by theholychesse



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: ;;;;))), Gen, POV Second Person, You've been warned, dark!Doctor, her companions are very upset by this, like it's nothing graphic but STILL, this fic fills me to the pit of my stomach with dread so!!!! read it and feel it too, very dark like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 02:57:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17398709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theholychesse/pseuds/theholychesse
Summary: when you were a young boy, still in your first life, you had heard a prophecy within the stars and within time itself:you would be a killer, murderer-the-great, worst in all the universeand so you named yourself doctor, to avoid that fatebut once a killer, always a killer, you suppose





	Series 14, Episode 10 - The Doctor Pays.

**Author's Note:**

> i know antimatter gets thrown around in sci-fi all willy nilly, but for this fic, we're using antimatter as it is in the real world, with a few molecules of the stuff capable of destroying... fucking cities
> 
> so a ball the size of a tennis ball can do some real damage, you can imagine
> 
> >;3c

You remember, barely, the last words of the man who came before you.   
  
You remember him pleading, with all of his throbbing, aching, old-man heart, 

" _Never be cruel, never be cowardly. And never ever eat pears! Remember—hate is always foolish…and love, is always wise."_

_"Always try to be nice and never fail to be kind."_

You wonder, a little bit, if he would have recoiled at the sight of you, now.   
  
The foe you must best today? The Ishtari, a people with pretty shining feathers, beady eyes, and a desire for conquest that has won them four galactic quadrants within a quarter of a millennia.   
  
They are a physically feeble people, with hollow bones meant for flight, and elegant shining necks meant for lustful displays. By all rights, the Ishtari should have become a peaceful race—Naturally vegetarian, with the occasional desire for an insect snack, perhaps. They have no claws, no fangs, nothing to hurt or mar others with. A planet with no natural predators, a planet lacking violence and war.   
  
Perhaps that is why they went so bad. Perhaps it is fear, it is danger, it is a foe to fight which could have made them docile, made them sweet, made them reign over an empire of milk and honey and music and love, but instead they choose iron and lazers and conquest of all of the stars in the sky.   
  
The irony is not lost on you.   
  
As the Ishtari had no true foes on their planet, neither do you. Not anymore.  
  
The recon team came to Earth, to Sheffield, of course— _(You wonder you wonder: With Rose, with Donna, with Martha, with Amy, with Clara—It always was London. But now, with your fam from Sheffield, they all go to Sheffield, too. Do they follow your humans? Do they—Do they—Do they—)(They've no right to take your companions from you.)_  
  
They came to Sheffield, took the skins of the family in who's yard they had crashed onto, and pretended to be human for three long months.   
  
The father was named Mitchell. He was a new lawyer, who'd always wanted to be one, but had never had the money for university until now. The mother Heather, a woman devoted to her children and to her arts and crafts. You know this because her stichwork was all over the house, on the walls, on the couches, on the doormat outside, a proclamation of her skill and her love of the home which would be her tomb. The son was Simon, and because the children in his old school didn't want to call him by his real name, his family had moved him to a new school. The daughter was Bridget, and she would have started elementary school in a few months.   
  
The Ishtari killed them.   
  
They had no right to.   
  
This planet is under  _your_ protection.   
  
After the third month, the Ishtari scouts sent a message back to the fleet.   
  
_'This planet will fall within a day.'_  
  
And it would have. While UNIT may have been reinstated after the Dalek fiasco, it was still a shell of its former self.   
  
No, no, no. Yet again, the protection of Planet Earth falls to you.   
  
('But you like it', you think. 'You like it. You like their dependence, their hope, their trust. They do not see the Oncoming Storm, She-Who-Felled-Empires, but they see the funny little Doctor, prone to making faces and shifty flirty eyes and anxious smalltalk. They see the creature you were born as, but not the one you became.' The thought burns your throat and your stomach flips, hot and acidic.)  
  
You only became aware of what was happening when a mothership the size of the Moon entered Earth's orbit, and gave 72 hours for the humans to surrender peacefully to livelong slavery, or, with a fight, to total and utter annihilation.   
  
This was when you had entered the picture.   
  
With Ryan, Graham, and Yaz by your side, you had managed to locate the new UNIT headquarters, devised a plan, which was promptly thrown when world leaders decided to fight instead of going along with it.   
  
They had readied the planet's entire nuclear arsenal for this.   
  
The idiots didn't realize that even if they  _did_ blow the ship up, not only would they deal with fragments the size of countries, but with a furious armada which would melt Earth into cosmic sludge.   
  
So you did the only thing you could:   
  
The TARDIS arrives on the mothership slowly, almost peacefully.   
  
You open your doors, and a squadron of Ishtari Skinners patiently waits for you, alongside their commander who wears a cloak from the skins of all of the races she has conquered.   
  
She stinks of blood, the air heavy and metallic with it.   
  
You raise your hands, and your smile is slight. Your eyes twinkle with mischief.   
  
"We were not informed that the humans had instantaneous spatial transport at their disposal." The commander clucks with disapproval, more annoyed at your presence than anything else. Her voice is melodic, rising up and down in queer little ways. She is a fantastic singer, you could tell.   
  
"Well, they don't." You say, as if admitting an embarrassing secret. "I know, I know, several thousand years of civilization and they haven't even gotten a simple teleporter down? But I'll have you know, they've put their energy into other  _splendid_ ways. They've invented ice cream, and Mars bars, for example. Only race in the universe that has. Can you believe it? Love the lot of them, silly little things." Your voice is unimaginably fond.   
  
The commander is not impressed.   
  
"Get it out of my sight." She says, turning away. The Ishtari Skinners cock their weapons.   
  
" _Ah ah ah ah_." You say. "I wouldn't do that if I were you."   
  
"And why is that?" She asks, humouring you. There is a moment when her eyes trail over your body, heavy and appraising.   
  
She's not too bad herself—All sharp bones and luscious plumage, shapely fat and muscle at her breast and thighs, with a gently curved beak which does look like it'll perfectly fit in your hand.   
  
Another time, perhaps, when you're not entertaining a race willing to genocide your humans.   
  
"You fire one of those lazers at me, and guess what'll happen—" Your hand goes to your hood, and a Skinner twitches and gets closer, and you just shake your head, giving him a stare that one would give to a misbehaving child. Your hand goes into the lining of your hood, and you pull out a little orb, blood-red in hue.   
  
"Fruit?" The commander asks, incredibly unimpressed.   
  
"Nah." You say, tossing the orb between your hands. "Antimatter bomb."   
  
The entire control room freezes, watching you play with the bomb with wide frightened eyes. It's rather funny, actually, watching their eyes loll about as you play with the bomb.   
  
"It can't be." She says. "Even the Ishtari haven't mastered antimatter technology, why would the humans—" The commander's voice is shaking. Her melody is tinged by fear.   
  
Your gut burns with it. You feel drunk on it.   
  
Your smile is gentle, your eyes shine, and you are having so much  _fun._  
  
"When have I ever said that I was human?"   
  
The commander's eyes look like they're going to drop out of her head.   
  
She glances, quickly, over to a technician on the floor below, too quickly for the human eye to see, and you see him slowly move for a tablet, as the commander shifts, subtly, to cover their body from you.   
  
"No need for subterfuge, you can scan me right now! I don't mind, _really_." You say, delighted, and the commander begins to nervously click her beak.   
  
She steps out, and the technician raises the tablet, taking a scan.   
  
"She doesn't—She doesn't—She doesn't match anything—" The technician begins.   
  
"Look in the Elysian Archives. Password is 94fmfk38nf2hd9fbs." The passwords change every minute, but you've figured out their algorithm long ago.  
  
A few clicks.   
  
In the meanwhile, a Skinner behind you tries to move for the bomb.   
  
You give him a look, your expression bright and bubbly and shining and gleeful, cheeks pulling with your sharp grin, and he stops.   
  
The technician looks just about ready to faint.   
  
"She's—She's—She's—She's—She's—She's—" The technician is hyperventilating.   
  
You take pity on him. Your sonic hums, and the results are on every screen in the control room.   
  
Your biometric scans are right next to your information. For everything else in the Elysian Archives, considered the foremost source of information in the universe for anything, there are  _millions_ of pages about their specific subjects.   
  
On your bio, there are two lines.   
  
The first:  _The Doctor._  
  
The second: _Do not approach under any circumstance._  
  
"I'm the Doctor, pleased to meetcha." You chirp.   
  
The name ripples through the room.   
  
A few technicians really do faint.   
  
Ah, it's _good_ to have people know you, like, really, really, _really_ know you.   
  
"To cut a long story short." You shift your weight to your other foot. You play with the antimatter bomb, sliding your fingers playfully over it.   
  
"I've planted one of these—" You throw the bomb up in the air, and a few Skinners almost  _dive_ for it, but you snatch it out of the air before it can actually fall. "On every ship in this quadrant. I can set one of these up, be protected by the shields of my TARDIS, and blow up every other ship you have. I can blow up every planet you have—From the slave planets, the mining planets, to even—" You cock your head. "Your civilian planets. Your nursery planets. I can destroy  _everything_ you have. In a blink of the cosmic eye, I can wipe the Ishtari from the face of the universe."   
  
You shine with mirth. Your eyes, in the low, blue light, seem to gleam like sickly gold.   
  
The commander makes a shaky inhale.   
  
"We—We—We didn't—We didn't declare war on your people, only on Earth, we didn't—"   
  
_"But you did."_ You scream, suddenly.   
  
They all flinch. The sound reverberates throughout the room.   
  
You're not upset, not really. Your thumb swipes over the bomb, and your lips are curled with unnameable pleasure.   
  
"Because this planet? Is under my protection. It is  _mine._ "Your voice is venomous with possessiveness.   
  
"You have hurt  _my_ people, threatened  _my_ humans, decided to conquer  _my_ planet. And when you do that—You bring about a war with  _me._ " Your fingernails tap against the bomb, the sound filling the room, the only sound in this entire place. They're too scared to even chatter their beaks, to shake and to quake.   
  
"We'll leave." The commander says, immediately, thoughtlessly. Her eyes are manic with desperate fear. "We'll leave, and we'll never touch this planet, this solar system. We'll put up trade; We'll give the humans all the technology they could ever want, we'll be equal, or we could leave and never touch them again, we—"   
  
"That's not good enough." Your voice is low and toxic; The poison spreads through all your limbs, making them oh-so relaxed, making you feel oh-so heady and high. "That's not good enough."   
  
The commander swallows so heavily you hear it.   
  
"What... What do you want then?"   
  
You stretch the silence out.   
  
The air is painfully still, painfully tight.   
  
"Nothin'."   
  
The commander blinks.   
  
She doesn't dare speak, but the confusion is written all over her features.   
  
"Can you do me a favour? And pull up the maps of all of your ships? All of the quadrants?"  
  
No one does nothing for very long. You throw the antimatter bomb up in the air again, and only grab it once it's a few inches from the floor, making a small  _oof_ at having to reach that far down.   
  
They get the idea.   
  
Within seconds, an orange hologram lights up in the room, with white leylines and brown galaxies stretched across it.   
  
You know, ordinarily, all of the ships are marked in white, as well. Millions of white dots all across the map, across all four conquered galactic quadrants.   
  
But they're all red.  
  
Your smile is all teeth; You know that the people of Gallifrey evolved from predators, with sharp teeth and sharp claws and hungry maws, and only did millions of years of civilization pacify your people. But right now, you feel  _feral._  
  
"I  _may_ have made a teensy winsy little lie. I didn't just put bombs on all of the ships in the quadrant; But in all four. And I didn't just plant them."  
  
" _I_ _blew them up_." Your teeth clink with each enunciated syllable.   
  
"Because—Oh, what's your name, by the way? Bah, it doesn't matter—Be _cause_ , love, you didn't just touch what is mine, but you  _hurt_ them, you  _threatened_ them. You would have wiped them out, and that's all that matters to me. Once a killer, always a killer."   
  
If there's self-depreciation in your voice, no one comments on it.   
  
"And so?" You ask, the bomb held only by a loose curl of your fingers. "I wiped you out. I left the planets alone, I'm not a  _monster—_ "  _But oh oh oh oh oh you are, you are, Doctor, you are and you're drunk on it, high on it, in love with it, with your own damned accursed monsterhood._ "But, I wonder, how long will the slave planets, the mining planets, all of those planets you've robbed from their rightful owners—How long will it take them to understand that you've no more ships? No more weapons against you? That they outnumber you a billion to one?"   
  
Here you are; A predator amongst succulent, weak, ignorant prey, and you hunger.   
  
"How long will it take until the Ishtari are made the conquered, the enslaved, the forgotten, instead?"   
  
The air is fragrant with terror, with horror, with dread, with despair.   
  
You merely smile at the lot of them.   
  
The last you wished for you to be kind, to be wise, to be good. You are anything but.  
  
"Anyways!" You chirp, tossing the orb into your other hand. "Must be off, I'm worrying my fam enough, I'm sure—Great talk, lot a' ya!" You march over to the TARDIS, and no one even moves when you throw open the door.   
  
"Ta!" You shout, as the door shuts.   
  
You drop the bomb onto the floor at the last minute.   
  
The TARDIS is wracked by tremors, the shields fighting and fizzling, and you pet your old girl to sooth her in her trying time.  
  
You materialize back in the UNIT headquarters—A shack, really, a glorified shack out in the Scottish wastelands, but, hey! It's where you left your companions, so—  
  
"Well, that's done with!" You say, merrily, gently coming out of the TARDIS.   
  
"Fine folks, good talk. Talked 'em down—So they've left. Won't be touching the lot of you ever again, I  _promise_ you."   
  
Funny thing with antimatter bombs: When they're activated, the vaporization signal looks a lot like the signal from opening a wormhole. The humans won't know any different.   
  
Your smile is brilliant and bubbly and bright.   
  
But everyone in the room is quiet, staring wide and white eyed at you.   
  
"What?" You ask, eyebrows pinched with confusion. "Is it something on my face?" You bring a hand up, and wipe at your lip. You'd had ice cream a little before you'd left, and you would  _die_ from shame to know you'd talked with the Ishtari with any on your face—  
  
Only now do you hear your own voice reverberating throughout the room; Tinny and thin, as if from—  
  
"We'd put a microphone on you." Yaz says. Her voice—It's lacking any emotion. It's hollow, gutted. "You've forgotten, haven't you?"  
  
The floor disappears from under you.   
  
You feel nothing in your body.   
  
There is silence for several minutes, as you go through denial, anger, and then are made full with pure and utter horror.   
  
You speak up at some point—You don't know how long the silence has lasted.   
  
Your eyes are big and frightened and you are curled into yourself; You are terrified.   
  
"It's—It's—It's—"  
  
"It's not what we think, huh?" Ryan asks. His voice is all funny and hollow too. You hate it. You hate the sound of his voice like that, he's not meant to sound like that—  
  
"It's, It's, It's  _not_ , it's—" Your eyes flicker all over the room, panic making your face hot, making acid rise up your throat, making your breath quick.   
  
Everyone's faces are shocked.   
  
Everyone here knows who you are. Of course you do. You're Earth's Savoir, a thousand times over. They know you, they love you. You're the  _Doctor,_ you're—  
  
"You killed them." Yaz's face is full of furious tears. You make a small distressed noise in the back of your throat, and you take a step forward, intending on soothing her, oh no oh no she's not  _meant_ to cry she's—  
  
You hear the low whirl of weapons.   
  
The soldiers which flank Kate Stewart have raised their weapons at you.   
  
You look around, and you taste your own blood in your mouth.   
  
They look at you now, your precious humans, with a mixture of faces. Hate and fear and terror and loathing.   
  
You are not used to seeing these expressions on your people.   
  
"Yaz." You plead, breathily. "Ryan—" Your eyes flicker to him. He is closed off, eyes milky and lip painfully still. "Graham—" His eyes shine and his smile is light and self-depreciating. He looks at you, funnily enough, with pity, as well as so much hate that you feel scalded by it.   
  
"It's—It's—It's—I—I did to—Protect you, they wouldn't have left you alone, they would have—"   
  
"They would have. And you know it. You knew it, and you still fucking  _killed_ them—" Yaz's fists are clenched by her sides, and her face is made ugly and oh-so pretty by her tears.   
  
Your voice is shrill and high with defensiveness. “They’re warriors! I killed the war ships, the planets are fine, they're—"   
  
" 'How long will the slave planets, the mining planets, all of those planets you've robbed from their rightful owners—How long will it take them to understand that you've no more ships? No more weapons against you? That they outnumber you a billion to one.' " Ryan quotes you, word for word, completely deadpan. Oh, your clever, clever little boy, but why did he have to use his gift against you now you don't under—  
  
"It's not—" You beg, you plead. You drop to your knees, and your bones hurt. You look up at them, your companions, your humans—  
  
" 'How long will it take until the Ishtari are made the conquered, the enslaved, the forgotten, instead?' " There is nothing but infinite judgment in Ryan's eyes.   
  
Your next breath is shaky, full of high hitching notes.   
  
"Please, please, I've, it's for you, I love all of you, you're—"  
  
"Its for _you_ , Doctor." You haven't heard your name spoken like that for so long. Like an insult, like a curse, like the most hateful thing in the universe. You recoil at it, as if from a blow.   
  
Yaz is red and weeping and she is baring her teeth.   
  
"All this time, all this fucking time, you've been using us for your own entertainment, we're your  _pets,_ all— _All of us!_ Your humans,  _your_ humans—"   
  
"Yaz." Your tears are thick and salty and hang from the end of your nose.   
  
"You  _disgust_ me, Doctor."   
  
You look around.   
  
You see hate.   
  
You see disgust.   
  
You see your world crumbling around your ears, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. 

**Author's Note:**

> i literally have an assignment worth 1/12th of my entire uni grade due in two days what the fuck am i doing
> 
> anyways this was inspired by: 
> 
> https://superevilbeans.tumblr.com/post/181650456916/i-loved-the-way-13-treated-and-to-talked-to-this
> 
> am i sorry for this?
> 
> ... no


End file.
